The festival in honour of San Fermín
celebrated in Pamplona -los Sanfermines- is a mixture of the official
and the popular, the religious and the profane, for local people and
outsiders, the old and the new, order and chaos. And all of this packed
into one long week starting with a bang at midday on the sixth of July and
ending with the nostalgia tinged with expectation at midnight on the
fourteenth.

The Sanfermines have always been a
special festival but when Pamplona was sffll a smau unknown city
-provincial and clerical- the Sanf ermines found their most fervent
supporter in the American writer Hemingway.

The Sanfermines offer the visitor an open
and hospitable festival where anything out of the ordinary is welcomed and
soon becomes part of the tradition, so long as ¡t shows the respect due
to others. The Sanfermines is a fiesta where no one is an outsider,
everyone is equal and in which the festive spirit is never broken, centred
around the people of Pamplona in the widest sense: all the people who are
in the city during the always too short 204 hours of revelry, dancing,
prayers and bacchanalian extravagance.

lt shouldn't be forgotten that the
Sanfermines is a festival of religious origins and that this aspect is
still relived in huge demonstrations such as the Procession on the morning
of the seventh. But the religious celebration is in perfect harmony with
the cult of the bull -a symbolic animal- and with the cult of Bacchus, the
god of wine -a drink which ¡s no less symbolic. The Sanfermines are, in
short, a total, absolute and radical festival in which the people of
Pamplona play the leading part, but in which outsiders feel immediately at
home -there's no question of being a mere onlooker- as for nine days
Pamplona becomes the world capital of happiness.